Why did someone with a 180 end up going here? Not insulting the school, but it just makes no sense to me. Even if he is the student with the 2.02, I would imagine he would get into NU with their 170+ policy. I guess he was worried financially and made the decision. With that said, there are multiple schools in VA that would serve him better.

Last edited by Dmini7 on Sat Aug 31, 2013 11:53 am, edited 1 time in total.

Yale (along with Stanford and Berkeley, as the three schools with relatively little concern for numbers) is essentially exempt from a discussion based on the trends we're seeing. A little while ago, for fun, I built a "Yale class" based on how many people from LSN were accepted, only redone to reflect a hypothetical deeply-concerned-about-medians Yale. I came up with a 3.99/177 and stated that most of us should be grateful Yale keeps its medians within the realm of possibility instead of just saying LOLNO to almost everyone. The point of that was that Yale could easily (easily) have a 175 median if they wanted to. But one of the perks of being Yale is that you get to take whomever you like and the numbers usually just work themselves out. They don't need to have higher medians because it won't really change anything, other than to fuck up Harvard's medians just because they can.

TLDR we have nothing to learn from Yale's medians (although they're interesting in a celebrity sort of way), and Asha has the easiest job in the world.

Monochromatic Oeuvre wrote:Yale (along with Stanford and Berkeley, as the three schools with relatively little concern for numbers) is essentially exempt from a discussion based on the trends we're seeing. A little while ago, for fun, I built a "Yale class" based on how many people from LSN were accepted, only redone to reflect a hypothetical deeply-concerned-about-medians Yale. I came up with a 3.99/177 and stated that most of us should be grateful Yale keeps its medians within the realm of possibility instead of just saying LOLNO to almost everyone. The point of that was that Yale could easily (easily) have a 175 median if they wanted to. But one of the perks of being Yale is that you get to take whomever you like and the numbers usually just work themselves out. They don't need to have higher medians because it won't really change anything, other than to fuck up Harvard's medians just because they can.

TLDR we have nothing to learn from Yale's medians (although they're interesting in a celebrity sort of way), and Asha has the easiest job in the world.

Why did someone with a 180 end up going here? Not insulting the school, but it just makes no sense to me. Even if he is the student with the 2.02, I would imagine he would get into NU with their 170+ policy. I guess he was worried financially and made the decision. With that said, there are multiple schools in VA that would serve him better.

I'm more perturbed by the fact that Richmond came out with a class with only 10% minorities. Having a class that's 90% white in a city that's 60% minority is going to look...interesting, to say the least.

It seems like an extreme drop percentage wise for what would be a strong regional school.

Last year they offered increased $$$ to people to voluntarily defer because they had unexpectedly high yield. So this year they were much more conservative since they already had a significant portion in coming off of a deferral.

It seems like an extreme drop percentage wise for what would be a strong regional school.

Last year they offered increased $$$ to people to voluntarily defer because they had unexpectedly high yield. So this year they were much more conservative since they already had a significant portion in coming off of a deferral.

Yes, I remember them handing out $120,000 for a lot of people in the previous cycle.

I know it doesn't work this way, but you have to imagine most of the T14 would love to get LSAC to make the 2013-14 LSATs a half-notch easier at the top end, so that more people got 170+. I get that it would push the percentiles down, but since those don't matter for either rankings or for public perception (outside of TLS, of course), you have to figure the schools would love to be able to advertise a 170 median, even if in reality that meant less than it used to.

vuthy wrote:I know it doesn't work this way, but you have to imagine most of the T14 would love to get LSAC to make the 2013-14 LSATs a half-notch easier at the top end, so that more people got 170+. I get that it would push the percentiles down, but since those don't matter for either rankings or for public perception (outside of TLS, of course), you have to figure the schools would love to be able to advertise a 170 median, even if in reality that meant less than it used to.

Then I'm confused. If the schools really couldn't care less about the median, then why make any special efforts (as they have apparently -- or at least allegedly -- been doing) to keep medians as high as possible, e.g., by taking splitters? Or is all of this just baseless conjecture on the part of TLSers?

vuthy wrote:Then I'm confused. If the schools really couldn't care less about the median, then why make any special efforts (as they have apparently -- or at least allegedly -- been doing) to keep medians as high as possible, e.g., by taking splitters? Or is all of this just baseless conjecture on the part of TLSers?

They care about medians tremendously. But they could not care less about median as far as a raw score. You could call it a 40 or a 340 and it is meaningless. LSAC can tweak it up or down (keeping the dispersion a normal bell curve) and the static LSAT score is meaningless.

What just about every single law school cares about is their LSAT median relative to other schools, particularly those you compete against.

So if LSAC makes it "easier" or adjusts the scores so they are slightly higher, and Duke Law goes up +1 but Vanderbilt, UVA, NU, etc all go up +3, that is all that matters.

Interesting. So you mean that if given a choice between two hypothetical worlds, one where a 168 was 99th percentile, and the other where a 172 was 99th percentile, they really wouldn't care? I just assumed that, ceteris paribus, they would take the latter. I understand that from an admissions perspective, relative scores are all that matters. But at a minimum, you would think that the higher score keeps alums and, more importantly, donors happier than the lower one.

vuthy wrote:Interesting. So you mean that if given a choice between two hypothetical worlds, one where a 168 was 99th percentile, and the other where a 172 was 99th percentile, they really wouldn't care? I just assumed that, ceteris paribus, they would take the latter. I understand that from an admissions perspective, relative scores are all that matters. But at a minimum, you would think that the higher score keeps alums and, more importantly, donors happier than the lower one.

vuthy wrote:Interesting. So you mean that if given a choice between two hypothetical worlds, one where a 168 was 99th percentile, and the other where a 172 was 99th percentile, they really wouldn't care? I just assumed that, ceteris paribus, they would take the latter. I understand that from an admissions perspective, relative scores are all that matters. But at a minimum, you would think that the higher score keeps alums and, more importantly, donors happier than the lower one.